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Business News/ Mint-lounge / Features/  The cronut craze
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The cronut craze

In Mumbai, hotels and restaurants are rolling out the cult New York croissant-doughnut hybrid

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On Fox Traveller’s popular reality food show, Eat Street, host James Cunningham tours Canada and the US to showcase some of the most innovative food trucks. In most episodes, there’s at least one amateur chef running the meals on wheels business around deep-fried treats. Twinkies (the popular American snack cake), Mars and Bounty chocolate bars have often been dunked into fryolators by the dozen and served as dessert on the show.

On one episode, Miami’s Sweetness Bake Shop & Café claimed their most popular dish is the deep-fried cupcake. For $5 (or around 310), a choice of three mini cupcakes (red velvet, vanilla or chocolate) are battered and fried in piping hot oil and served with powdered sugar and a condensed milk dipping sauce, thus proving that Americans are fried-food fanatics.

So, why does New York-based French baker Dominique Ansel’s “cronut"— a croissant and doughnut hybrid—surprise anyone? It’s anyone’s guess why a deep-fried viennoiserie, already made with butter, has turned into a worldwide fast-food fad. All we know is that customers line up as early as 4am at the bakery on Spring Street, SoHo, to get their hands on Ansel’s $5 pastry hybrid (each person can only buy two at a time). Pre-order lists, lotteries and black market businesses have sprung up too—tourists scour Amazon.com deals on how to score one without queuing up.

Ansel’s website has a special “Cronut 101" page, explaining that a cronut isn’t merely “croissant dough that has been fried" and that the name itself is trademarked. That hasn’t stopped keen imitators across the world from dishing out their versions under monikers such as dough’ssant, zonut and frissant.

In Mumbai, five-star hotels are among the first to produce and publicize the cronut. At The Taj Mahal Palace hotel’s 24-hour coffee shop Shamiana, a week-long burger festival boasts of not one, but two of these cross-breed creations. The Lyon comes with coddled eggs, sliced ham and hollandaise sauce on the round flaky pastry (as a replacement for the burger bun) and the Anchorage is made with a crab patty stuffed in between a cronut bun. But at 795, the Anchorage didn’t seem very different from a croissant sandwich.

Over the weekend, the Bombay Baking Company Deli at the JW Marriott Hotel Mumbai too sent out boxes of cronuts to food bloggers and critics. When we called to inquire on Monday morning, a public relations executive informed us that because of the fuss over the cronut’s trademark, the hotel’s bakery has postponed its launch.

At American fine-dining restaurant Ellipsis in Colaba, chef Kelvin Cheung has been documenting his experiments with the cronut on Instagram. Cheung says he first sampled the cronut in Chicago and took on its production as a challenge only recently. Even though its weeks away from being retailed, Ellipsis has already been getting inquiry calls and orders for the cronuts.

The Burger Festival ends on 11 August at Shamiana, The Taj Mahal Palace, Apollo Bunder, Colaba, Mumbai. Cronut burgers from 595. For more information, call 022-66653366 or email tmhfb.bom@tajhotels.com. Croissant-donut hybrids will soon be available at Ellipsis, Amarchand Mansion, 16 Madame Cama Road, Colaba (022-66213333) and Bombay Baking Company Deli, JW Marriott Hotel, Juhu Tara Road, Juhu, Mumbai (022-66933000).

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Published: 06 Aug 2013, 07:53 PM IST
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